Cry Havoc

by Simon Mann

  My whole crew are broken up. Dispersed all over the prison. It’s a wipe-out. For Valentine it is a Pyrrhic victory. He too has to leave the section. He winds up murdered – still in prison – over a homosexual love affair.

  Valentine is the one who laughs most at the notes I write in the margins of my books. He’s the one most worried when he hears me talking to myself, as I pace my seven paces up, seven paces down … hour after hour … night after night.

  They used to laugh at me bashing the mozzies – the lawyers, I call them – as I paced up and down. A pair of shorts over my shoulder or in my hand as my fly swat. Bang! Bang!

  ‘You bastard motherfucking lawyer … take that. Don’t you know this is a No Fly Zone?’

  Not long after that, Lucky is out – having fixed a dodgy ‘bail on appeal’ ruling.

  But Norman the Refrigerator suffers the worst. He has been a true friend to me. He has helped me out, often – and often when there was no gain to him.

  Norman is HIV-positive. We all try to help. I campaign to have him signed up with a UK charity run by friends of Amanda: the Ark Foundation. They try to get anti-retrovirals into places that don’t give them to their HIV people. Of course – that isn’t allowed in Mugabe’s Workers’ Paradise.

  A month after the FB 1 explosion, I’m passing through the Maxi Gate (with my standard ten-man escort, bayonets fixed: me in leg-irons, and two pairs of handcuffs, one pair for my two hands, the other pair round one wrist of mine and that of a Security sergeant) when I see Norman. He only just recognises me. I’ve failed to recognise him. He’s thin and drawn, his head lolling. The two men carrying him do so with ease.

  One month later, Norman is dead.

  He dies because of the FB 1 explosion. He dies because of our helicopter. I didn’t know that a small downgrade of diet could kill an HIV man so fast. Once transferred back to the madness of a big section, his diet fell over. Norman follows. It’s all wrong. Norman could be alive.

  Zimbabwe learns what is happening to their Refrigerator. Even so, food parcels are denied him. An appeal, to spend his last few days at home, is turned down.

  It scares us all to see how brutal this gangster regime is. But for me – in the abstract – I am grateful to see tyranny at work. Tyranny squashes peoples whole.

  But you can’t become a tyrant on your own. It’s a pact. Tyranny is a pyramid, and the pyramid is made of petty tyrants.

  Beneath, the povos. Us.

  I see that people ruled by tyranny are helpless to get out from under. Tyrants prosper, unless an outside force comes in.

  My friend Wicknell – well educated and bright – will tell me a load of shit against ZANU PF one afternoon. The next morning I laugh at the unfree and unfair election results. ‘Oh no,’ he says. ‘Don’t you dare criticise ZANU! I’ll report you to my uncle.’

  Amazed, I ask him about what he had said yesterday. No, the election is free and fair. The Party says so.

  Tyranny is many pacts with the devil. Quid pro quo. I’ll believe whatever the Party says. I’ll do whatever the Party tells me to do. In return, the Party will feed and clothe me. Put me above my peers. Everyone in the pyramid makes that Faustian bargain.

  Every little tyrant in the pyramid lives by those rules. All the way up to the tyrant at the top. In prison I read Simon Schama’s series of books A History of Britain (wonderfully and lovingly sent by my North Foreland Court buddy Tim Robarts). I am deeply struck by the English people’s struggle to win their freedom, which Schama describes as ‘the English Epic’.

  In prison I think about how hard it is to win, with no outside help. How precious it is. How essential. How easily lost. How tyranny can take away freedom in different guises. Different ways.

  It isn’t that I have any great revelations in gaol. But I do find myself seeing things more clearly. Prioritising better.

  The automaton Security officers act as programmed by the Party machine. They anger me. Sometimes I am rude to an officer. He says, ‘But, Shumba, I’m just doing what I’m told… What can I do?’

  ‘Walk out of here. Keep walking. Go to your village out in the rural areas … but on the way – as soon as you can – take off that uniform. Burn it…’

  Sometimes I try to explain how, especially at the Nuremberg Trials, it had been firmly established that there is no such thing as collective guilt. Each guard, each officer, each whatever is guilty for what he does. Under orders. Not under orders.

  One sergeant, when we are talking about the cruelty of the prison, and of his government, and of his tyrannical party, ZANU PF, says to me that Chikurubi is a white man’s prison. Africans, he says, didn’t build Chikurubi. That is true. Chikurubi Maximum Confusion was built to a British Maximum Security Prison design, by an Australian contractor, for Ian’s Smith UDI regime. They too were at war with their own people.

  Chik has a gallows room and a guillotine room, with a coffin-making workshop handy next door. All these are just down the passage from FB 1, where I live, because it used to be Death Row. These days Zimbabwean hangings are all carried out at Harare Central, although two condemned men have been in FB 1 with me, before Valentine’s explosion.

  The sergeant is saying that Africans didn’t build Chikurubi. Couldn’t physically build it even if they wanted to. But wouldn’t anyway. It is a white man’s prison because it is carefully and methodically put together in order to inflict a structured and disciplined disembowelment of the human spirit.

  Africans may do terrible things to one another, but in the heat of the moment. They’ll chop a head off, or an arm, in hot blood. But long-term custodial imprisonment is not a part of their culture. They’ll build a kraal of thorns to keep you in – for a while – maybe starve you – a bit – but not a Chikurubi.

  As I tell them, when they say to me how uncivilised Africa is, that it was Europe, who in living memory, suffered World Wars I and II. Hitler. Stalin. How civilised is that?

  The same sergeant, another day, out of the blue asks me, ‘So, Shumba, all this Jesus Christ, and the Lord God Almighty … all this religion … is this something you believe in? Or is it just more rubbish left behind for us…? By the white man?’

  ‘Just more rubbish,’ I said. That was an easy one.

  The Valentine FB 1 explosion comes at a bad time for me. I’m finding it harder to do my exercises and to run, because of my hernia. The thing is dangerous and needs an operation. I know that, if my gut becomes stuck outside the stomach wall, then I have only 24 hours to live. That isn’t enough time to get you to surgery. Not in one of Mugabe’s prisons.

  One day, one of my hot water men charges into FB 1.

  ‘Shumba … it’s all over … you are going home …’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘There has been a coup in Guinea. The government is changed. You will be free.’

  I start to cry. I sit on the floor of my cell, where I never ever sit, my back against the wall. Tears fall. My shoulders shake. I haven’t admitted to myself before now how badly I want to be free.

  Hours pass, then days. Waiting for news. It comes: there was a coup – in Guinea Republic. Wrong Guinea.

  By now my visitors – the Croc, the British Consul (I’m on my third by now. They are all excellent) – know not to ask me how I am.

  How do you think?

  But prison officers asking me that question cannot be answered in the same way. Not because I don’t dare be rude to them. On the contrary. Shumba can be as rude as he likes. He’s worth too much money – to Mugabe – for an officer to hit him.

  FB 1 now has four prisoners in it: three new ones and me. The three have all been chosen for being half-brained and non-English-speaking. They are there to sweep the yard. To do my dhobi. To do the things a white man mustn’t do.

  I complain to one of my best officers, one whom I have helped with money for his journalism studies. ‘These guys in here, X, … none of them can speak English.’ (I must not name X. He’s still there. He asked for more help the other day.
But I can’t help any of them just now. When I make some money, yes.)

  ‘Ah, they can hardly speak Shona, Shamwari.’

  But they are Shona, not Matabele. They are not Ndebele speakers. They are the village idiots, as they used to say – or shout – back at dear old Sandhurst.

  One of the Security sergeants puts Magneto into FB 1. He takes out one of the village idiots. Even so FB 1 is now solitary confinement in all but detail.

  I start to water the weeds that live between the concrete slabs. It starts as a joke, but then everyone joins in. One of the plants is milk nettle. Medicinal, so they say.

  There are 14 plants of enough stature to count. More little ones.

  I am alert to going crazy. I think. The plant business might be a sign, but I know that I am fine. Just before the FB 1 explosion, Valentine himself had become upset. He could hear me in my cell. Talking to myself. Pacing.

  It’s true, but that too is fine.

  I found myself doing it, became worried, but then decided that it felt better that way … so it must be fine.

  I’m sure that I’m fit and mentally sound, even though the fear that I may go mad is real. I think about it often. Every time that I pass myself mentally fit and fine, I think of the comedy patient, in a straitjacket, in a mental hospital. He’s Napoleon. He would tell you, if asked, that he – Napoleon – is mentally fit and fine too.

  So, OK, ya.

  I do talk to myself. All the time. I like myself. Sometimes my jokes are funny. I mean: I know I’m doing it. I’ve got to talk to someone. If only to cope with my ongoing anger for ‘London’. When I get a letter from them, I know it will take me a week to get over it.

  In the old days in FB 1, we used to have some very high-quality singing, led by Hassan Banda. African. Or Jazz.

  When everyone left the section, after Valentine, I missed it terribly. Friday night was always a big singing night. Especially the last Friday of the month, when the officers had been paid their pittance. Their voices and complex intertwining African harmonies were wonderful. Fugue-like.

  A couple of weeks after Magneto comes to FB 1, he tells me how much he misses the singing too.

  ‘Well – Magneto … sing then!’

  ‘But I can’t sing, Shumba…’

  I don’t believe him. An African who cannot sing beautifully? They are born and raised to it … but it is true. Magneto can’t sing. He asks me to sing. Magneto is vital to my sanity. I know that I feed him cigarettes, water, tea, food… Anything to keep Magneto happy, and in FB 1.

  But sing?

  I sing.

  He asks for the repertoire again. Then again. The next night. The next. So now – most nights – I sing for Magneto. I don’t know how many songs. ‘Once a Jolly Swagman’, ‘A Bicycle Made for Two’, ‘My Rhubarb Refuses to Rise’, ‘What Shall We Do With a Drunken Sailor’, ‘Daisy Bell (A Bicycle Made for Two)’, ‘The Eton Boating Song’, ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’, ‘The British Grenadier’, ‘Early One Morning’, ‘Sigh No More, Ladies, Sigh No More’ (from Much Ado About Nothing), ‘Rule Britannia’ (with most words replaced by ‘pom-poms’), ‘Jerusalem’.

  Magneto’s favourite?

  ‘Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do.

  I’m half-crazy all for the love of you.

  It won’t be a stylish marriage.

  I can’t afford a carriage.

  But you’ll look sweet upon the seat

  Of a bicycle made for two.’

  Maybe he likes it so much because it is short. We never ask the village idiots what they want, or what they think. One of them – a self-confessed child rapist – wasn’t up to much thinking. He was the one I had to order to use a container when he was delousing his blankets in the sun.

  The Croc and I work on a letter from me to the UK government and the European Commission. It sets out my situation. It begs that they should stop my extradition to EG.

  I will be killed.

  This letter is smuggled back and forth between me and the Croc as we draft it. It is moderate. Careful. The fair copy goes out.

  ‘London’ block it. They will not even allow the British Consul in Harare, Sarah Mannell, to see a copy. Not even if she sits and reads it in the Croc’s office, then hands it back to him.

  But why should I worry?

  ‘London’ are refusing me an advocate (barrister). They are blocking my letter to my own government. They don’t explain these actions. They just happen. They screwed up the helicopter deal. They stonewalled Charlie Wake and his deal. Then Mike Christie.

  Then they do the same when Wicknell gets out. They won’t even see him. All along, I know they are acting in my best interests. The torture of not knowing what they are doing, and not understanding what they are trying to do, is too much…

  I pace seven paces up. Seven paces down. Talking to ‘London’ in my cell. Cursing them.

  Sometimes in Chikurubi, I forget that I have not committed a crime at all. I begin to think of myself as my fellows do: as a law-breaker. I forget to ask, whose law? By what right? By whose mandate?

  There isn’t a man inside Chikurubi who is more criminal than the government who had put him here.

  Even if you say that to overthrow a murderous tyrant is illegal, or ethically wrong, I hadn’t done so.

  Intent is not an attempt.

  Anyway … where’s my victim? Raped? Robbed? Defrauded? Hurt?

  A little later, I am hugely relieved to find that My Honourable Friends among the UK Law Lords agree with me. Nine Law Lords agree that no offence was actually committed, whatever the intent. Of course, that the Law Lords find in this way doesn’t help in the slightest. Even in the UK, all that happens is that EG lodge a new appeal.

  Even more costly.

  Then I get an email – brought in by the Croc – along with my others. Missed by Chik’s censorship.

  Two misses. It’s incredible. I’m being censored by ‘London’ and the Croc.

  As if the CIO Security censorship weren’t enough of a head-fuck.

  The email is from a woman named Miss Wilna Lubbe. She tells how she has tried, but failed, to get through to me before. This time it works, because the email is short and vague. The ‘From:’ is someone unknown, some South African prisoner welfare charity. The email asks me to make contact.

  When I see Wilna’s name, my heart leaps: she is the old EO attorney. A message from her is as clearly from Coebus, Michael and Tony Buckingham as if they themselves had all signed it. At last, I think. My old friends are doing something out there. I knew they would be. I just hadn’t seen anything yet.

  By luck, one of Lucky’s best ‘travel agency’ customers is around, and mad to travel. He has just been made a sergeant, but Security hate him. They know he is a rotten apple. I give him the codename ‘Uncle Keith’. I write a note and give it to Uncle Keith to email to Wilna. He has to go to a Harare Internet café. I coach him.

  Slowly, dangerously, through emails back and forth, a plan comes about. Uncle Keith will travel to South Africa, meet Wilna in Pretoria, then travel south to meet Mike Christie in Cape Town. (Mike was, in fact, already dead. I didn’t know.) Sure enough, an escape plan is taking shape. With a little more money, I know I can make it work.

  Uncle Keith wants to do a ‘ringer’. He will get hold of an exact replica of the OIC’s car. On the night – a wet one – Uncle Keith’s ‘ringer’ will be identical to the OIC’s car – in every detail.

  We drive out. Guards salute.

  Piece of piss.

  It takes months but Uncle Keith makes this epic journey to South Africa. He meets Wilna, but obviously not Mike. His escape plan shuffles forward until, one day, I get a smuggled letter tossed into my cell.

  My hair stands on end.

  I read and reread. Over and over. Wilna (and therefore Michael, Coebus and Tony Buckingham) are begging me to sign a letter of instruction to their lawyer in London. I know of this lawyer because Michael had achieved great things with him in the old days.


  They have a deal in place with the EG authorities that will get me out, in exchange for my cooperation and information.

  I cannot believe the words in front of my face. This letter is not one from a hysterical or ill-informed source. The letter goes on. It begs me to do as they say because, they fear, unless I do so, there will not be a happy ending. They don’t spell out ‘Mann to EG’. They don’t have to.

  An answer is urgently required. They have given me a draft of words that will legally oblige my London lawyer to do as he is told by the lawyer instructed by Michael and Tony Buckingham. Uncle Keith whispers to me, dangerously, in terrible English. I have to do this now.

  My head is in my hands. I can’t bear it. Where is Amanda? I need her. My whole instinct and training is to stick with the chain of command. To be loyal. I could go this route, as they ask, and fuck up whatever it is that ‘London’ are doing … are about to pull off. Whatever it is that they are so sure will work.

  I stick to it. I am loyal. I write, but not the words they want. I tell them to work with my sister. I write to her telling her that she must work with them.

  I hear nothing. Weeks pass. Nothing. Then a letter comes from my sister, who has spoken to Michael Grunberg. This lawyer has a poor reputation, she says. I curse, ‘For what? For being effective?’ In any case, she cannot see that what is on offer is worth pursuing.

  Everything is fine her way, she says.

  So … why should I worry?

  Not long after that, Uncle Keith left the ZPS, disgusted with my lack of adventure. He had wanted me to be his big meal ticket, knowing that, if he made my escape, then he would be rich.

  Only three months later, I hear terrible news. Uncle Keith has been arrested in Harare. He was caught red-handed in a bank robbery, in the getaway car, with a Star 9mm in his waistband.

  It takes another two months, and £200, but we get him bail so he can do a runner. This is Africa. A man can easily disappear. Then reappear as a new one.

  Things in Chikurubi grow worse and worse. For me. For everyone. As they do throughout Zimbabwe.